And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them:
Thou shalt ... utterly destroy them, х hachªreem (H2763) tachªriym (H2763)] - thou shalt devote to destruction, as accursed; thou shalt exterminate them (Leviticus 27:28; Numbers 21:2; Deuteronomy 3:6). [When Yahweh threatened to destroy utterly the Israelites for the violations of His covenant, it is expressed by lªkalchaam, from kaalaach (causative of Qal), to consume, to destroy. The Septuagint has: afanismoo afanieis autous, 'thou shalt make them utterly disappear.']
Make no covenant with them. This relentless doom of extermination which God denounced against those tribes of Canaan cannot be reconciled with the attributes of the divine character, except on the assumption that their gross idolatry and enormous wickedness left no reasonable hope of their repentance and amendment. If they were to be swept away like the antediluvians, or the people of Sodom and Gomorrah, as incorrigible sinners who had filled up the measure of their iniquities, it mattered not in what way the judgment was inflicted; and God, as the Sovereign Disposer, had a right to employ any instruments that pleased Him for executing His judgments.
Some think that they were to be exterminated as unprincipled usurpers of a country which God had assigned to the posterity of Eber, and which had been occupied ages before by wandering shepherds of the Hebrew race, until, on the migration of Jacob's family into Egypt through the pressure of famine, the Canaanites overspread the whole land, though they had no legitimate claim to it, and endeavoured to retain possession of it by force. In this view their expulsion is considered by many just and proper. But Moses never justifies the invasion of Canaan by Israel upon that ground. He uniformly represents it as a free gift of God, the land which He had promised to give them, and the right to occupy which had been forfeited by a race whose unnatural sins and monstrous crimes had put them out of the pale of humanity.
The strict prohibition against contracting any alliances with such infamous idolaters was a prudential rule, founded on the experience that 'evil communications corrupt good manners,' and its importance or necessity was attested by the unhappy examples of Solomon and others in the subsequent history of Israel. But it is observable that the ban of excommunication was limited to them. And it is of the greatest consequence, in order to a right understanding of the Levitical covenant, that we guard ourselves against the error of the later Jews-that they only were to be favoured by God, or that they were too good to associate with the uncircumcised, and were even defiled if they entered into the Gentile judgment hall (cf. John 18:28; Acts 11:1-18: 'Israel after the Flesh' p. 86).